Guantanamo

A military judge attempted to speed up the Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunals by ordering the justices overseeing them to move to the US naval base in Cuba. Now one of those judges has ruled that the since-rescinded order was unlawful influence.

A military judge has put the oft-delayed 9/11 trial on hold until the Department of Defense walks back an order requiring the judges presiding over the case to move to Guantanamo Bay in order to proceed with the trial.

Lawyers describe it as the domestic equivalent to a CIA black site. Their clients “disappeared there” for 12-15 hours before being arraigned. A man died there. Another man left with a head injury. A teenager went missing.

A former Chicago homicide detective accused in a federal civil rights lawsuit over wrongful conviction is alleged to also have carried out interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, where his methods were described as “illegal,” “immoral” and “unconstitutional.”

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rejected Poland’s appeal to overturn a criminal investigation into officials working at a secret prison used in the CIA torture program. The Polish government now has to conclude its investigation and pay damages.

The British family of Guantanamo detainee Shakar Aamer, who has twice been cleared for release by US authorities, have pleaded for Prime Minister David Cameron to again raise his case with President Barack Obama.

Closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility “is a national security imperative,” an Obama administration official told the Senate this week. However, the White House faces tremendous opposition with the newly GOP-controlled Congress.

A White House spokesperson preferred to talk of the Taliban as “an armed insurgency” rather than a terrorist organization during a press briefing, when a reporter pressed him about Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s release.

Cuban leader Raul Castro has called on the US to end the economic embargo against the country and demanded that Guantanamo Bay be returned to Cuba as relations between the two nations undergo a historic thaw.

The upheaval within Yemen’s power structure must be considered when deciding whether to transfer Yemeni detainees held at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, US Defense Department head Chuck Hagel said.

US authorities have told would-be jihadist David Hicks’ lawyer that the Australian is innocent of the crimes he allegedly committed in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, which cost him six years in Guantanamo prison.

Officials at the Guantanamo Bay prison complex in Cuba tried to trick Mauritanian detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi into cooperating by forging a letter from his mother who couldn’t even write, his brother Yahdih, has said.